KIRI Engine Adds Real-Time Relighting and Eevee Mesh Shadows in 3DGS Render 5.1.0

KIRI Engine has released 3DGS Render 5.1.0, adding real-time relighting and Eevee mesh shadow support for gaussian splats in Blender.

Version 5.0.0 arrived in June carrying a Blender 5.2 patch. 3DGS Render 5.1.0 adds Blender 5.2 support outright while retaining Blender 5.1 compatibility, and KIRI clean installed and tested the release on Windows against Blender 5.1.1 and Blender 5.2.0 LTS.

KIRI Engine calls the relighting an artistic approximation, on the grounds that ordinary gaussian splat files do not carry the surface, material and lighting information Blender's physically based renderers need. World and HDRI lighting produces smooth diffuse illumination, not sharp HDRI reflections, and the add-on recognizes only a Texture Coordinate, optional Mapping, Environment Texture, Background and World Output chain. Complex World node chains are not evaluated.

Direct relighting supports up to sixteen lights and native mesh shadows support up to four. Point lights render six shadow views, so refreshing a high resolution point light cache costs more time and GPU memory than a Sun, Spot or Area shadow. GS self shadows are a sampled proxy approximation, and their detail and refresh cost depend on Total Max Cards, Alpha Cutoff, shadow resolution and the number of cached lights. GS to Mesh Shadows (Eevee) is a separate control from Cached Shadows (Mesh to GS).

Render mode splats now follow Blender's per proxy visibility controls, with the Outliner eye and monitor controls driving the live viewport and the camera control driving offline stills and animations, respecting animated render visibility, excluded view layer collections and render disabled collections. Shift+D duplication of Gaussian proxies is fixed, so copies are discovered automatically and rendered with their own transform, visibility and animation, though each copy adds another complete splat set to the GPU.

Spherical harmonic rotation during baking is now GPU accelerated with automatic CPU fallback, proxy rigging deformation is improved, proxy binding validation failures raise a Blender warning instead of a Python traceback, and degree 0 gaussian splat PLY files lacking optional higher order spherical harmonic attributes are handled better.

Both headline features are credited to outside contributors, Hrsh-Venket for the proxy rigging, GPU and Blender 5.2 work and punk-kaos for Blender 5.2 support, real-time relighting and mesh shadows. The release notes add that the GitHub code may move ahead of packaged releases, written documentation and existing tutorials as the project transitions toward community maintenance.

It is available now under an Apache 2.0 license.